Quotes from Alexander Chee

There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing.

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don't think there's any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d'Enfer -- underneath this life, but never really apart from it.

He smiles at me, and it is a knock on my chest, as if he had reached out and rapped it. My chest opens, my heart admits him.

The quiet around her seems to make the focus of her prettiness sharper, the air's stillness focuses her in the eye. As if talking might make it harder to see someone.

Sometimes, I think I know what my grandparents were listening for. Sound waves don't ever go away. Not one sound goes away. The wave simply expands, infinitely. The sound remains. Imagine a cosine arc the size of Jupiter, and that might be the size of the wave of the last thing Peter ever said. I'd need an ear the size of another solar system to hear him again.

But inside the self performing as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I'd had of my life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the bark still smooth to the end -- the word FINE painted on it.

I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag.

It's a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.

My mother's most common childhood memory of me is standing next to me trying to be heard over the voice on the page. I didn't really commit to writing until I understood that it meant making that happen for someone else.

That art -- even, or perhaps especially, art that is dedicated somehow to tenderness, dedicated as a lover who would offer something to her beloved in the last nights they'll share before she leaves this life forever -- is not weak. It is strength.

I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew and I know that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, to easily changed.

And then she leaned back her head with the faintest smile and, tapping her chin, asked, Are you in love with him, this mystery composer? How can I be? I asked in return. I don't even know him. Almost every opera is about this, she said, her smile growing. Love before first sight.

It isn't just that you fall in love with someone—you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you'll be next.

Waiters and escorts both know that indiscretion is a career-ending move. You reveal a secret only if you are never going back again.

A singer learned her roles for life - your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed.

Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.

It's much like writing an essay or including autobiographical content in fiction—to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see.

You might think that your voice as a writer would emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you'd be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it has to be cut free.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

The catcalls from the cars make me feel strong at first. Isn't beauty strong? I'd always thought beauty was strength, and so I wanted to be beautiful. Those cheers on the street are like a weightlifter's bench-press record. The blond hair is like a flag, and all around me in the night are teams. But with each shout, I am more aware of the edge, how the excitement could turn into violence, blood, bruises, death.

There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know.

And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates. The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.